socialsoftware

May 12, 2012

When I ran for student body President at Foothill College (where I'm giving this year's commencement speech), they had each candidate record a video pitch. Even back then I was a pretty good speaker. But in a room with just a camera pointed at me, no audience to feed off of, I found myself rediculously self-concious and started to choke. Later I lost the campaign, to my roommate. I chalk it up as a learning experience.

Yesterday morning I found myself in a room with a camera pointing at me, but it was telepresence to Moscow, giving a talk for the Digital October program. I've used telepresence for a meeting before, and it seemed to work well for conversations. In this case, the feed back to me was a nice live stream. Panning the audience, zooming in on an expression of someone listening intently to live translation, backing out to see my big head on a screen.

While I have no idea if the talk was lost in translation (my worst experience was in Japan when I had to pause after each sentence for the person next to me to translate it), in retrospect I realize that telepresence shaped my talk. Its the first time I've given a speech and not cracked a single joke. I found myself focused on communication alone. The feed back to me helped me understand a little of how what I was saying was heard, but it wasn't enough to really engage the audience.

Telepresence will never replace face-to-face, but will have a strong role as flying to Moscow will always be painful, at least in my lifetime. So the learning I'm going to try next time is to use the pictures and sounds I get from the feed back as inputs to my imagination while giving the talk. This is the same lesson I thought I had learned from 20 years ago, that when you can't see your audience, imagine having a conversation with it.

Recently I found myself trying to explain what I do to someone that doesn't really use social software or have an interest in business. Before explaining the differences between the consumer web, professional use and enterprise use I had to find a metaphor to explain design choices for social spaces and what they imply. I fell back upon pattern languages from my early days with Socialtext.

So I described how you would build a building for social interaction, what motivations you can tap into and the role of social objects. All core concepts I credit other for, that together help tell a story, as you can see from the slides and hear from the recording.

I hope to find time to develop another version of this that includes more patterns and makes the story more engaging. Almost like an IA lecture combined with an entrepreneur's pitch, translated for real people.

November 08, 2011

Its so fun to write oversimplified posts about such-and-such is dead. Not because its true. At best you can point out something is broken and alternatives are rising fast.

But I wonder how the people behind the aging technology and cash cow think of it. And some of the most interesting conversations must have been within Google as Facebook was rising up to close the open web, by making new things the web was perhaps missing openly available at scale. Conversations that effect us all.

Maciej Cegłowski has a new, but good-old social software post, about how the abstractions that are social networking sites will never reflect real social networks, and how brands awkwardly fit in them. Pull quotes:

"If the social graph is crude oil, doesn't that make our friends and colleagues the little animals that get crushed and buried underground?"

"Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender."

"Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph."

"Now tell me one bit of original culture that's ever come out of Facebook."

You see, as Facebook effectively took a massive amount of people's time off of the open and discoverable web, and with Like took their gesture otherwise as the big fat input. PageRank initially relied on a few strong inputs from people who realized their own power an skill to publish. Then with social search it didn't need so much power (e.g. this post). Then it was commoditized down to a single click. The single gesture of someone logged in somewhere. Probably where they have committed their time and identity because of a broad social pressure that exists in the real world.

But I found this single image today absolutely stunning:

If it wasn't clear, Google is all-in with +1 and Google+. And interestingly giving brands a very direct role in directing gestures with it. All +1s can be consolidated for a brand. And lo and behold, Google is creating a namespace to replace URLs. If you type + before something in Google or their browser bar, you get autocomplete for a Google+ Brand Page that has aggregated all the gesture in the direction that brand organizes and in part pays for. All SEO practices are about to be rewritten.

But here's what's interesting. +1 keeps evolving towards an alternative to penetrate the social and otherwise closed web without Google+ being sucessfull. I don't think this is a new point, or inherently evil. Its just become more visceral.

Maciej's post focuses on how nodes and edges in a graph can never truly be representational. No more so than how profiles will always be a lie and out of date, but at least they are from just the point of view of an author. But gesture of attention have always been simple enough to say, look here. And with social search you get that fuzzy implicit semantic bullshit to say this language means something like the way you are talking to the command line. Its not as perfect and impossible as ODF bullshit. But its coming faster, with new politics and commercial interests than ever.

The gesture equivalent to making a link of course got easier. But the ownership of that gesture for those who are at scale has as well.

(disclosure, I tried to get a job at Google in 2002. I told them I wanted to build a +/- gesture graph for search, blogging and social networking. Probably bad ideas. I didn't get the job, but that is more proof that I'm a loser than the need for disclosure)

Google Plus has a different privacy/sharing model than other social networks. Different from Facebook's confirmed tie model that they have been gradually breaking with ever more granular complexity. Different from Twitter & SlideShare's model of Asymmetric Follow, where people can follow/subscribe to posts that are public. Google+ is Asymmetric Sharing, where you selectively choose to share, but to make it into the main stream of view, someone nees to choose to share back. I give it high marks on privacy, but it inherently comes at a cost for complexity, virality, discovery and retaining social context.

February 16, 2011

A long time ago Tim Oren scribbled this on a napkin to help explain a little of what he learned about collaboration.

We put wikis in the top left, email in the bottom left and IM in the bottom right. He described that at the top right is a collaboration sweet spot, but a place that is very hard to start off with. You create something to the left or below it and try to evolve it. You could easily put Twitter and Socialtext Signals in the top right. Twitter in effect evolved out of eariler learnings from blogging. Signals was an evolution of a social software platform. Good theory, and the point is doing new things in real time is hard.

Today SlideShare launched Zipcast, a web conferencing product that is fast, simple and social. Its a natural evolution of what SlideShare has been, a new way to asynchronously share slides. Its new not just in how it is integrated into the fabric of the real time social web. Building a collaboration solution on top of a thriving professional sharing community with millions of presentations viewed by over 45 million people per month is decidedly new.

If you are in marketing, you can host social webinars with promotion being a byproduct of using it. If you are in sales, you can launch a pitch immeadiately without the complexity of setup and asking someone to install a download. If you simply have an idea to share, there is no stopping you because it is free for public and viral meetings.

And what I really like about is it is web conferencing actually on the web.

Various criticisms have been raised against the channel, however, including the fact that it does not allow comments and accusations that it is simply a way for Pfizer to boost its profile. Experts have questioned whether the new venture can be called ‘social media’ when it simply provides one-way information.

It is currently under debate whether the pharmaceutical industry can legitimately engage through social media due to the strict regulations that govern its interactions with the public.

The FDA and pharmaceutical companies in the US are working towards establishing some ground rules to guide the industry’s online interactions, and these are likely to have an impact internationally.

I consider myself reasonably qualified to determine what is social and not. It took a little digging, as Pharma News doesn't write articles with links, which must mean they are 'not web.' But here are some tweets:

@boegner: Pfizer on Slideshare is NOT a social media activity. How can it be when its one-way info ? Comments are turned off. #hcsmeu#hcsm

Which raises some fair points, but comments are just one way to social within the power law of participation. And a lawyer might point out that comments directly on the content of a regulated company are a no-no. See Prem's
post for a discussion on the legal risks at stake for regulated social media for Pfizer and others.

What Pfizer has accomplished so far sharing -- in ways their industry should follow. The content is shared in an accessible way within the largest community of sharing professionals. People can favorite it, share and embed it. In other words, they they are weaving core content into the social fabric of the web. From there, conversations can occur in blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more.

Now, Pfizer does have employees on those networks where conversations can occur about the content. In fact they did:

Responding to critics on social media platform Twitter, Ray Kerins likened the current situation for pharma companies seeking to use social media to “assembling a child’s toy without the instructions”, adding: “SlideShare is part of our multi-year strategic digital//SM plan and we are happy with the progress.”

And people commented back:

London-based healthcare communications agency Aurora has defended the use of SM amongst UK pharma in its blog. The company’s Neil Crump wrote that “as pharma companies venture into this uncharted territory, our early champions must be encouraged, must be championed, must be nurtured. Otherwise we will lose them and we will be back to square one, and that would be a terrible shame.”

Sounds social. Regulation seems to introduce some friction to the process. What is said on the web sometimes goes through a vetting process, or is done by individuals qualified enough that regulated companies take risks on them. Regulation effects design, in the same way that form follows funding. You won't find open comments under the brand of a a regulated institution anytime soon. Regulation also gives weight to to some parts of the web. Identity infrastructure, has evolved recently with promise for the distributed identity than we have seen before.

We're often swift to say how regulation stifles innovation. But it also yields innovation. Not to work around it, but with it on values that are important in some fields like identity, privacy, trust and accountability. And being social.

December 21, 2009

Richard McManus of RWW notes the continuing decline of RSS Readers, suggesting the market is largely dominated by Google and in disarray. Five years ago there was a perception that this was a hot category. An underlying standard was freeing up new atomized content and conversations that could be pulled and curated. Bloglines was acquired, and new clients were popping up weekly.

I believe an opportunity to cooperate beyond the syndication format, on standards for the basic usability of subscribing (the Coffee Cup problem) was missed at the time when it mattered. Innovation continued with the rise of Netvibes with the widget model, and Google Reader as a Bloglines 2.0. But then it stopped.

We all know that Twitter cannibalized RSS Reader habits with something simpler and social. And innovation happened elsewhere for aggregation with simple focused things like Techmeme. And that enterprise RSS innovation moved away from clients. But iGoogle and Netvibes widgets as Twitter clients were developed by third parties. Perhaps it was innovator's dilemma on a compressed scale, but the Readers didn't expand what could be read.

There is a ton of innovation in the Twitter client space. From Seesmic to Tweetie (I paid for it) to Brizzly (Jason Shellen created Google Reader). 107 clients on oneforty.com. There are some that bring baseline newsreading and conversations together, like Threadsy. With blogs adopting the Twitter API, the future will be reverse engineered.

Jeff Nolan and I usually spend our time disagreeing about politics and agreeing about tech, further demonstrating that smart people can be idiots. I can't disagree with him that there is no RSS Reader market today. But I can surmise that if the original players in the market stopped thinking of it as software, and kept evolving it into something closer to FriendFeed for people who want less information -- the network would be the market. And an opportunity remains.

September 09, 2009

Mashable: Socialtext Mobile: Business Activity Streams On the Goby Barb Dybwad, September 9, 2009"If you’re one of the many enterprise (and increasingly, small
business) users of Socialtext, you’ll be excited about today’s
Socialtext Mobile beta launch news. If you’re in the market for an
Enterprise 2.0 solution for your business, there’s even more reason to
get Socialtext on your roadmap."

Venture Beat: Socialtext builds mobile web apps for collaborationby Anthony Ha, September 9, 2009"Socialtext President and co-founder Ross Mayfield says the mobile
version of Socialtext should includes almost all the features found on
its downloadable application Socialtext Desktop — namely, you’ll be
able to read colleagues’ Twitter-style comments and post your own
comments in Socialtext Signals, follow co-workers’ activity streams,
view their profiles, and also read and edit content in Socialtext’s
wiki workspaces."

eWeek Socialtext Releases Mobile Web App for iPhone, BlackBerry, Androidby Clint Boulton, September 9, 2009"The lightweight Web app works on Apple's iPhone, Research In
Motion BlackBerry smartphones and Android smartphones, allowing users
to access Socialtext's Twitter-like Signals microblogging tool and
browse through users' activities, content and contacts. Users can then
access a contact's virtual business card by clicking to e-mail or call
the contact from their smartphone."

InternetNews: Socialtext Mobile Delivers Broader Accessby David Needle, September 9, 2009"Users won't have to do any extra configuration to use the mobile
version. Socialtext Mobile automatically detects when you log in from a
mobile phone and serves up an optimized mobile application."

ReadWriteWeb Socialtext Goes Mobile But Forgoes an Appby Steven Walling, September 9, 2009"Rather than a native application tailored to the iPhone,
BlackBerry, or Android, Socialtext chose to create mobile browser
version that is cross-platform by default. The site will detect when
you're logging on through a mobile device and redirect you to a
subdomain with a custom UI, which was built to reflect the desktop
version of Socialtext."

In conclusion, even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e., anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.

I’ve tended to believe that if anything, social software would help raise the Dunbar number. The studies above suggest this is not the case. But I’m still holding on to my hunch.

Why? Because I think we live in an age where there something wonderful happening, something that just has to affect the Dunbar number, something that is accentuated by social software.

Something wonderful is happening, but it is augmentation, not accentuation. The Dunbar limit of 150 is the number of people and how they are related to each other at a moment in time. It is a cognitive constraint, a ceiling that can't be broken (perhaps until neurotechnology messes with our wetware).

What Social Software can do for your Dunbar number is help what goes in and out of the 150. Help you discover people you should add to your network. Stay in touch with old friends so they can be active friends for at least a moment in time. Help others sift out of view. Your Dunbar number is made up of both strong and weak ties that happen to all be related somehow to you for a moment in time. Social Software has even more potential to help refresh your cache of 150 for a moment in time to serve your changing needs.

September 07, 2008

Last week I was on a panel at Office 2.0 discussing "who owns community?" Organizational Development was just one topic we explored, and ZDnet has a brief video excerpt. In this post, let me clarify my comments.

Leadership in Distributed Organizations

My CEO Eugene Lee was recently an executive at Adobe and Cisco. The transition over the past year wasn't just from Bigco to Startup. Half of Socialtext's employees are distributed across four continents. Eugene recently observed that "in a distributed organization, leadership matters more than management."

This isn't just about motivating distributed teams. Distributed teams have higher coordination costs without a clear direction. This is similar to Eugene Kim's point that "there is no such thing as collaboration without a goal." An extreme example is viewing Wikipedia as distributed mass collaboration, where the clear mission of what to create and why not only attracts volunteers, but reduces the costs of coordinating them to the point where a phantom authority can work.

At the scale of a distributed startup, leadership amounts to establishing a focus. If you attempt to manage at the task level instead of providing a framework for team members to decide if something is within or without the focus of the team, the team isn't moving fast enough. Management does provide the process discipline and measurements to sustainably keep the smaller decisions in check with focus, but it underperforms in abscence of leadership. And there is another word for too much management, overhead.

When everyone works in one place, "management by walking around" comes at the cheap. Walking around four continents is not. As our distributed collaboration tools get better at sharing social context as a byproduct of being productive, new management practices unfold. I think we are just beginning to discover the practices for managing networked organizations, and one of them is the emphasis of leadership.

Who Should "Own" Community?

On the panel I answered with the always correct answer that "it depends." But also suggested that ownership of community will trend in two directions. Social Software has made community a strategic imperative for many organizations. Recalling when risk management became a strategic imperative in some industries about ten years ago, you saw the rise of the Chief Risk Officer. While the emergence of a new CxO function is fleeting at best, I was provocative to make a point that we could see the rise of the Chief Community Officer to align and coordinate internal and external communities.

But there is a more likely scenario -- where community becomes a function of process ownership. I don't beleive it will be left to specialist Community Managers who report into Marketing. Community will become a facet of everyone's job. Not just external communities for customers and partners and media and investors and developers and more. Every process in the enterprise has the potential to be redesigned with more transparency and participation through Social Software.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Process owners will lead communities. They have the domain expertise within and around the process to drive conversation and collaboration around aligned goals. However, it will take time to acquire community skills and for the organization to transition.

360 Degree Process Communities

Let me illustrate this scenario. Today ownership in corporations of customer communities commonly resides in marketing. This makes sense when you consider "Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view" (Peter Drucker twittered via Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle). But marketing doesn't own all the more specialized processes that create this view, so Marketing Managers become traffic cops and attempt to interface the whole organization. Customer communities are more sterile, homogenized and veneer than they will be in the future. When people seeking support, sales, partner, developer and media conversations intersect primarily with one part of the organization that has its own goals and measurements -- you have an elephant trying to fit through a keyhole and nobody knows who has the key.

Before issuing a call for a COO, consider this evolution. Support often is the next group to take ownership of its community. Sometimes there is organizational alignment behind it (the VP of Support also owns Product Quality, or dotted lines with Marketing). With this more specialized ownership, the VP of Support then manages two communities and possibly a third. Contact Center employees and customers seeking after-market product support, and potentially tapping across the entire organization to help resolve exceptions.

This is a 360 degree view of community around a set of processes. Consider the same for Marketing. More specialized ownership would have them transition MarCom processes into driving the conversations around those communications. But also increased focus on internal communities, beginning with their most important customers, sales (we just concludes a webinar series on collaboration between marketing and sales, available for download). In today's market, where 50% of consumers trust the voice of the rank and file employee over the CEO, the more active Marketing is in internal communities, the more successful external communities become.

Initially, 360 Degree Process Communities will be formed by front office such as marketing, sales, business development, professional services and support. HR has already begun this evolution within the back office. And while you may discount it at first thought, don't rule out process communities in back office functions like finance where you least expect it.

Process to Practice

Mike Gotta once made an important distinction clear for me. That Process is "how work should be done." And Practice is "how work is actually done." When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn't exist, practice fills the void. While people don't realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community -- an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven't had the tools to support good practice. The problem is that we haven't developed the group memory around practice that creates institutional leverage. In fact, we still design organizations to prevent practice and cultures that hoard knowledge and communities. With all the focus on Process Execution, its time to instill at least awareness of Practice Execution.

October 26, 2007

This is a pretty big milestone in the development of the Enterprise 2.0 category at-large. Just a few years ago, the only analysts covering the space were blogalysts. Now, perhaps the most rigorous and influential vendor analyst reports in enterprise software says it really is enterprise software. The analysis rightly says we all have work to do.

It also says that Socialtext is the most visionary provider and behind only Microsoft, BEA and IBM in execution. This tells me that if we want to be the leader we need to demonstrate better execution (mind you, I'm not taking out IBM next year, but it is good feedback). SuiteTwo, of which we are a core component, also scored well in vision but has a way to go in execution.